Climb aboard Reagle's 'Showboat' July 6-16

Monday

Jul 3, 2017 at 4:00 PM

By R. Scott Reedy, Correspondent

Playing major roles in both “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Les Misérables” helped make Ciarán Sheehan a bona fide Broadway leading man.

The Dublin, Ireland, native candidly admits, however, that his Broadway success doesn’t mean he’s an expert on the Great White Way. Indeed, when he was cast in the Reagle Music Theatre of Greater Boston production of “Show Boat,” opening in Waltham July 6, he had to brush up a bit on the iconic musical.

“I’m not a big musical theater fan so I don’t know this show well,” explained Sheehan during a conference call with his “Show Boat” co-star, Sarah Oakes Muirhead. “I was approached by Hal Prince to go into the 1994 revival, but I was doing ‘Phantom’ at the time and I just wasn’t ready to take off that mask.”

Sheehan developed his affinity for the familiar mask during some 1,000 performances as the title character in the Toronto and Broadway productions of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, after having played Raoul in the show in New York for 2 1/2 years.

His Waltham run will be shorter, of course, but Sheehan is no less eager to tackle the role of Gaylord Ravenal, a suave riverboat gambler, in the 1927 musical based on Edna Ferber’s novel, with music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II.

“I’m very much drawn to Gaylord and I’m very touched by him," said Sheehan, who now calls Ridgewood, New Jersey, home. "He’s a flawed character, but hopefully I will make him sympathetic. I always look for the love, and it’s definitely there between Gaylord and Magnolia Hawks (Muirhead), the daughter of Cap’n Andy Hawks, who owns the Cotton Blossom show boat,” says Sheehan.

“Characters like the Phantom, Billy Bigelow from ‘Carousel,’ which I did last summer in Waltham, and Gaylord don’t really see their own value. Gaylord is much more sophisticated, but he still doesn’t value himself as much as Magnolia does.”

That appreciation doesn’t happen instantly, though, according to Muirhead.

“With Magnolia, we get to watch this tremendous maturation over the 40 years the show covers, from her being just a girl herself to her being the mother of a young girl. Magnolia has a huge heart. She’s very much her father’s daughter and she’s grown up on the show boat in her father’s world of superlatives.

“Gaylord is one of the first real and great things in her life. Once she feels that about him, it sticks. One of the moments I love most is the number ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ in Act 1, when all the important female figures show Magnolia how to love a man.”

A Verona, New Jersey, native, Muirhead now makes her home in Boston, where she has been seen in Huntington Theatre Company productions of “A Little Night Music” and “Sunday in the Park with George.” The Boston University graduate acknowledges that she, too, was unfamiliar with her current assignment before being cast.

“I had never done ‘Show Boat’ or even seen it before I spoke with director and choreographer Rachel Bertone about doing this production,” explained Muirhead.

“I’m building my own familiarity with the show and with my character at the moment. This version is great, because the music and dance really support the story,” she added.

Muirhead is not alone in her admiration for the Goodspeed Musicals adaptation being presented in Waltham, which reimagines the masterpiece about life on a Mississippi River show boat between 1887 and 1927.

“I haven’t seen this show since Hal Prince’s production in the mid-'90s, but Rachel told me it has been cut down quite a bit,” says Sheehan. “I love this version. It is very tight. Some songs and dances have been trimmed. The show is now more focused on the relationships among the characters and it’s very moving.”

That new focus, however, is not at the expense of the one of the great scores in American musical theater history, according to Muirhead, who will be seen in “Tartuffe” with the Huntington this fall.

“The music is so swelling and so full, it just sweeps you away,” she says. “Kern knew how to write a melody and also how to write for the human voice. And thanks to Hammerstein’s lyrics, everyone knows these songs and can hum this music.”

Songs like “Ol’ Man River,” “Make Believe,” and “Bill” have helped cement the status of “Show Boat” as a classic. Despite many revisions over the years, though, the show is still seen by some as racist because of its sometimes one-dimensional depictions of African-Americans.

“The story spans 40 years and the one thing that doesn’t change in that time is race relations. Doing this show in 2017 represents an important opportunity and one I hope is seized. The idea of African-American representation in shows like this is part of an ongoing conversation. And it is important today to make sure that there’s no push to just make everything neat,” says Muirhead.

Sheehan – who is hoping to produce the Eugene O’Neill play “Anna Christie” off-Broadway later this year before heading out on tour with “The Four Phantoms in Concert” – has his own perspective.

“It is clear that certain characters within the story are racist, but I don’t find the piece itself racist,” says Sheehan. “I look at characters like the dock worker Joe (being played in Waltham by Michel Bell, a 1995 Tony nominee for the same role in the last Broadway revival of “Show Boat”) and his wife, Queenie, the ship’s cook, as having very hard lives. They deal with their lot in life, however, by turning to each other.”